Overview

The wise man never takes a step too long for his leg.

( African saying)

In this chapter you will be introduced to the SYSMOD approach for modeling of complex systems based on a practical example used throughout this book. I selected a practical system that is easy to understand, and includes all necessary aspects. The approach scales very well and can be used both for much larger and much smaller systems than the one in our case study.

Using the same example throughout this chapter will make it easier for you to gain an overall insight, to better understand the approach discussed here, and to easily apply it to your practical environment. In fact, we don't jump from one island solution to the next in our practical projects either, but have to consistently apply our approach.

We will begin with the project context, looking at our system as a black box, ^[1] studying the environment, and will then successively delve into the details. This approach corresponds to a widely used pattern: identify an element, describe some context (external view), and then immerge (internal view). Since we will be starting in the green meadow, the approach covers all areas pertaining to a development process. Of course, the approach would also work if you were to start off from an existing system, the difference being that you would probably leave out a few steps or slightly modify some steps.

Look at the individual steps of the approach as...